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I’ve become a grandfather in recent years and I’ve rediscovered the wonderful experience of strangers stopping and talking to you in the street when you have a baby with you.

Babies just seem to break down barriers, and God understands this.

He couldn’t have made himself any bigger to impress us. So instead he made himself smaller, to attract us and draw us closer.

God himself risks our disinterest and rejection by coming among us in a vulnerability and innocence every family can recognise.

I think this prose poem captures something of this. I was introduced to it by Eddie Askew, the writer and artist.

Blessed are you, O Christmas Christ

that your cradle was so low that shepherds, poorest and simplest of all earthly folk, could yet kneel beside it, and look level-eyed into the face of God.

At the time of Jesus’ birth, shepherds were literally ‘outsiders’, living on the margins of society. They were poor and very largely ignored, expected to know their place and look up to everyone else. So how remarkable and significant that these are the first people called to see for themselves “this thing that had taken place”.